Thursday, March 31, 2016

On the last day of summer, some years ago, a young college graduate moves to Chicago and rents a small apartment on the north side of the city, by the vast and muscular lake. This is the story of the five seasons he lives there, during which he meets gangsters, gamblers, policemen, a brave and garrulous bus driver, a cricket player, a librettist, his first girlfriend, a shy apartment manager, and many other riveting souls, not to mention a wise and personable dog of indeterminate breed.

A love letter to Chicago, the Great American City, and a wry account of a young man's coming-of-age during the one summer in White Sox history when they had the best outfield in baseball, Brian Doyle's Chicago is a novel that will plunge you into a city you will never forget, and may well wish to visit for the rest of your days.

A witty, intelligent cultural history from NPR book critic Glen Weldon explains Batman’s rises and falls throughout the ages—and what his story tells us about ourselves.

Since his creation, Batman has been many things: a two-fisted detective; a planet-hopping gadabout; a campy Pop-art sensation; a pointy-eared master spy; and a grim and gritty ninja of the urban night. For more than three quarters of a century, he has cycled from a figure of darkness to one of lightness and back again; he’s a bat-shaped Rorschach inkblot who takes on the various meanings our changing culture projects onto him. How we perceive Batman’s character, whether he’s delivering dire threats in a raspy Christian Bale growl or trading blithely homoerotic double-entendres with partner Robin on the comics page, speaks to who we are and how we wish to be seen by the world. It’s this endlessly mutable quality that has made him so enduring.

And it’s Batman’s fundamental nerdiness—his gadgets, his obsession, his oath, even his lack of superpowers—that uniquely resonates with his fans who feel a fiercely protective love for the character. Today, fueled by the internet, that breed of passion for elements of popular culture is everywhere. Which is what makes Batman the perfect lens through which to understand geek culture, its current popularity, and social significance.

In The Caped Crusade, with humor and insight, Glen Weldon, book critic for NPR and author of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, lays out Batman’s seventy-eight-year cultural history and shows how he has helped make us who we are today and why his legacy remains so strong.

John le Carré described Dispatches as “the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time”. Although written in the 1970s, it flashes back to the height of the Vietnam war in the late 1960s, crafting characters that in turn influenced Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. It is war reportage, battlefield drama and intense tragedy and remains one of the great war books even today.

No One Knows has already had some interest, so I hope this isn’t a purely hypothetical exercise. This one was very hard, because I haven’t had anyone in mind for any of these roles outside of Chloë Grace Moretz, who has always been Aubrey Hamilton to me. That innocent face hides so much! I can absolutely envision her in this role as the young widow who’s lost her entire world and is trying to put herself back together again.

Finn Wittrock, who was in Unbroken, could totally pull off...[read on]

When Riley and Asha finally reached the planet Terminal and found the Transcendental Machine, a matter transmission device built by an ancient race, they chose to be "translated." Now in possession of intellectual and physical powers that set them above human limitations, the machine has transported them to two, separate, unknown planets among a possibility of billions.

Riley and Asha know that together they can change the galaxy, so they attempt to do the impossible--find each other.

A huge, ambitious re-creation of the eighteenth-century Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the pivotal battle in the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763) to win control of the trans-Appalachian region of North America, a battle consisting of the British and American colonists on one side and the French and the Iroquois Confederacy on the other, and leading directly to the colonial War of Independence and the creation of Canada.

It took five years of warfare fought on three continents—Europe, Asia, and North America—to bring the forces arrayed against one another—Britain, Prussia, and Hanover against France, Austria, Sweden, Saxony, Russia, and Spain (Churchill called it “the first world war”)—to the plateau outside Quebec City, on September 13, 1759, on fields owned a century before by a fisherman named Abraham Martin . . . It was the final battle of a three-month siege by the British Army and Navy of Quebec, the walled city that controlled access to the St. Lawrence River and the continent’s entire network of waterways; a battle with the British utilizing 15,000 soldiers, employing 186 ships, with hundreds of colonists aboard British warships and transports from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, with France sending in a mere 400 reinforcements in addition to its 3,500 soldiers.

The battle on the Plains of Abraham lasted twenty minutes, and at its finish the course of a continent was changed forever . . . New military tactics were used for the first time against standard European formations . . . Generals Wolfe and Montcalm each died of gunshot wounds . . . France surrendered Quebec to the British, setting the course for the future of Canada, paving the way for the signing of the Treaty of Paris that gave the British control of North America east of the Mississippi, and forcing France to relinquish its claims on New Orleans and to give the lands west of the Mississippi to Spain for surrendering Florida to the British.

After the decisive battle, Britain’s maritime and colonial supremacy was assured, its hold on the thirteen American colonies tightened. The American participation in ousting the French as a North American power spurred the confidence of the people of New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, who began to agitate for independence from Great Britain. Sixteen years later, France, still bitter over the loss of most of its colonial empire, intervened on behalf of the patriots in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783).

In Northern Armageddon, Peter MacLeod, using original research—diaries, journals, letters, and firsthand accounts—and bringing to bear all of his extensive knowledge and grasp of warfare and colonial North American history, tells the epic story on a human scale. He writes of the British at Quebec through the eyes of a master’s mate on one of the ships embroiled in the battle. And from the French perspective, as the British bombarded Quebec, of four residents of the city—a priest, a clerk, a nun, and a notary—caught in the crossfire.

MacLeod gives us as well the large-scale ramifications of this clash of armies, not only on the shape of North America, but on the history of Europe itself.

Cormac McCarthy is a hero of mine. Most of his novels are broadly picaresque–the characters travel through a landscape (always described with extraordinary vividness and originality) and have a series of typically violent or frightening encounters with other people. The Road certainly fits that pattern. It’s a grim post-apocalyptic adventure story complete with cannibals and babies on spits. The home is destroyed and the mother is dead well before the novel begins, but there is a definite glimmer of hope at the end when the dying father entrusts his son to a new family.

I am constantly reading and my choices are varied, not only authors, but fiction and nonfiction, poetry, sciences. Recently I was pleased to read that Andre Dubus, a truly fine writer, begins his writing sessions by reading poetry. The depth of an image and a truly original metaphor, along with syntactical invention and attention to rhythm (musicality) of language is something I appreciate and informs my prose.

Recently I read Tijuana Book of the Dead, poems by Luis Alberto Urrea, who is a triple threat in that he writes fiction, nonfiction and poetry equally well. In this new collection of poems the conversational can suddenly bloom into a lyrical rose where even plain language, everyday speech, is marshaled into service of a metaphor. Urrea leads the reader into dangerous human territory with humor and...[read on]

A singularly compelling debut novel, about a desert where people go to escape their past, and a truck driver who finds himself at risk when he falls in love with a mysterious woman.

Ben Jones lives a quiet, hardscrabble life, working as a trucker on Route 117, a little-travelled road in a remote region of the Utah desert which serves as a haven for fugitives and others looking to hide from the world. For many of the desert’s inhabitants, Ben’s visits are their only contact with the outside world, and the only landmark worth noting is a once-famous roadside diner that hasn’t opened in years.

Ben’s routine is turned upside down when he stumbles across a beautiful woman named Claire playing a cello in an abandoned housing development. He can tell that she’s fleeing something in her past—a dark secret that pushed her to the end of the earth—but despite his better judgment he is inexorably drawn to her.

As Ben and Claire fall in love, specters from her past begin to resurface, with serious and life-threatening consequences not only for them both, but for others who have made this desert their sanctuary. Dangerous men come looking for her, and as they turn Route 117 upside down in their search, the long-buried secrets of those who’ve laid claim to this desert come to light, bringing Ben and the other locals into deadly conflict with Claire’s pursuers. Ultimately, the answers they all seek are connected to the desert’s greatest mystery—what really happened all those years ago at the never-open desert diner?

In this unforgettable story of love and loss, Ben learns the enduring truth that some violent crimes renew themselves across generations. At turns funny, heartbreaking and thrilling, The Never-Open Desert Diner powerfully evokes an unforgettable setting and introduces readers to a cast of characters who will linger long after the last page.

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Filled with deceptions both real and imagined, Death Sits Down to Dinner is a delightful Edwardian mystery set in London.

Lady Montfort is thrilled to receive an invitation to a dinner party hosted by her close friend Hermione Kingsley, the patroness of England's largest charity. Hermione has pulled together a select gathering to celebrate Winston Churchill's 39th birthday. Some of the oldest families in the country have gathered to toast the dangerously ambitious and utterly charming First Lord of the Admiralty. But when the dinner ends, one of the gentlemen remains seated at the table, head down among the walnut shells littering the cloth and a knife between his ribs.

Summoned from Iyntwood, Mrs. Jackson helps her mistress trace the steps of suspects both upstairs and downstairs as Hermione's household prepares to host a highly anticipated charity event. Determined to get to the bottom of things, Lady Montfort and Mrs. Jackson unravel the web of secrecy surrounding the bright whirlwind of London society, investigating the rich, well-connected and seeming do-gooders in a race against time to stop the murderer from striking again.

In this compelling and revelatory book, an investigative journalist explores the lifecycle of the gun—following those who make firearms, sell them, use them, and die by them—with a special emphasis on the United States, to make sense of our complex relationship with these weapons.

We live in the Age of the Gun. Around the globe, firearms are ubiquitous and define countless lives; in some places, it’s even easier to get a gun than a glass of clean water. In others, it’s legal to carry concealed firearms into bars and schools. In The Way of the Gun, Iain Overton embarks on a remarkable journey to understand how these weapons have become an integral part of twenty-first century life, beyond the economics of supply and demand.

Overton travels through more than twenty-five countries around the world and meets with ER doctors dealing with gun trauma, SWAT team leaders, gang members, and weapons smugglers. From visiting the most dangerous city in the world outside a war zone to the largest gun show on earth, his journey crosses paths with safari hunters and gun-makers, paralyzed victims and smooth-talking lobbyists. Weaving together their stories, Overton offers a portrait of distinct yet deeply connected cultures affected by the gun and from them draws out powerful insights into our weaponized world. Ultimately, he unearths some hard truths about the terrible realities of war and gun crime, and what can be done to stop it.

Eloquent and accessible, infused with compassion and humor, The Way of the Gun is a riveting expose about guns and human beings that offers an eye-opening portrait of our time.

I remember reading this legal thriller about an unfaithful husband accused of murdering his former mistress back in the late 1980s and literally gasping at the twist. I was reading it so fast, dragged headlong by the plot, wrongfooted by the red herrings and the unreliable characters, that I almost missed it the first time. When my brain caught up seconds later, I flipped back a page and reread it. I could not believe what Turow had done. It was brilliant then and still is now.

Well, the movie rights haven’t sold yet so this is pure fantasy, right? Since it’s fantasy, I don’t have to be bound by people being the right age or even actually alive, right? Super. I’m good to go, then.

I’d cast Jenna Elfman as Rebecca Anderson, my protagonist. She has the kind of natural beauty and grace I’d like for Rebecca as well as a bit of playfulness about her that would totally be perfect for my sassy heroine.

Monday, March 28, 2016

In an obsessive mystery as thrilling as The Girl on the Train and The Husband’s Secret, New York Times bestselling author J.T. Ellison will make you question every twist in her page-turning novel—and wonder which of her vividly drawn characters you should trust.

The day Aubrey Hamilton’s husband is declared dead by the state of Tennessee should bring closure so she can move on with her life. But Aubrey doesn’t want to move on; she wants Josh back. It’s been five years since he disappeared, since their blissfully happy marriage—they were happy, weren’t they?—screeched to a halt and Aubrey became the prime suspect in his disappearance. Five years of emptiness, solitude, loneliness, questions. Why didn’t Josh show up at his friend’s bachelor party? Was he murdered? Did he run away? And now, all this time later, who is the mysterious yet strangely familiar figure suddenly haunting her new life?

In No One Knows, the New York Times bestselling coauthor of the Nicholas Drummond series expertly peels back the layers of a complex woman who is hiding dark secrets beneath her unassuming exterior. This masterful thriller for fans of Gillian Flynn, Liane Moriarty, and Paula Hawkins will pull readers into a you’ll-never-guess merry-go-round of danger and deception. Round and round and round it goes, where it stops…no one knows.

Right now I'm blissfully sternum-deep in Helene Wecker's debut novel, 2013's The Golem and the Jinni. And let's go ahead and slap a big ol' asterisk on the end of that last sentence right now, because technically I'm re-reading it.

That's not something I do a lot, but I'm doing it for this book, because the damn thing works so well, so unshowily, and with such assured grace that I wanted to go back, get a look under its hood and root around a bit.

To back up: The Golem and the Jinni is set in the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the turn of the 20th century. A golem -- the legendary creature of Jewish folklore -- arrives in America from the old country utterly lost. She's been made in the shape of a woman, see, and like any golem, she is imbued with the driving need to serve a master. That master died in passage, however, and...[read on]

A witty, intelligent cultural history from NPR book critic Glen Weldon explains Batman’s rises and falls throughout the ages—and what his story tells us about ourselves.

Since his creation, Batman has been many things: a two-fisted detective; a planet-hopping gadabout; a campy Pop-art sensation; a pointy-eared master spy; and a grim and gritty ninja of the urban night. For more than three quarters of a century, he has cycled from a figure of darkness to one of lightness and back again; he’s a bat-shaped Rorschach inkblot who takes on the various meanings our changing culture projects onto him. How we perceive Batman’s character, whether he’s delivering dire threats in a raspy Christian Bale growl or trading blithely homoerotic double-entendres with partner Robin on the comics page, speaks to who we are and how we wish to be seen by the world. It’s this endlessly mutable quality that has made him so enduring.

And it’s Batman’s fundamental nerdiness—his gadgets, his obsession, his oath, even his lack of superpowers—that uniquely resonates with his fans who feel a fiercely protective love for the character. Today, fueled by the internet, that breed of passion for elements of popular culture is everywhere. Which is what makes Batman the perfect lens through which to understand geek culture, its current popularity, and social significance.

In The Caped Crusade, with humor and insight, Glen Weldon, book critic for NPR and author of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, lays out Batman’s seventy-eight-year cultural history and shows how he has helped make us who we are today and why his legacy remains so strong.

Douglas Rushkoff's latest book is Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. One of his six favorite books about big ideas, as shared at The Week magazine:

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller

This is the biggest little book I know, jamming the grandest ideas of the 20th century's greatest designer into just 120 pages of conversational text. In brief, our problems are not laws of nature, but artifacts of bad design decisions. And we can change them.

Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 traces the evolution and consequences of a new hybrid paradigm, which grants a heroic status to victims of national tragedies, and by extension to their families, thereby creating a class of privileged participants in the permanent memorial process. Harriet F. Senie suggests that instead the victims' families be able to determine the nature of an interim memorial, one that addresses their needs in the critical time between the murder of their loved ones and the completion of the permanent memorial. She also observes that the memorials discussed herein are inadvertently based on strategies of diversion and denial that direct our attention away from actual events, and reframe tragedy as secular or religious triumph. In doing so, they camouflage history, and seen as an aggregate, they define a nation of victims, exactly the concept they and their accompanying celebratory narratives were apparently created to obscure.

Opening a gourmet popcorn shop was never on Rebecca Anderson’s bucket list. But after a failed marriage to a celebrity chef, she’s ready for her life to open up and expand. She has returned to her hometown of Grand Lake, Ohio, with her popcorn-loving poodle Sprocket to start a new business—naturally called POPS. As a delicious bonus, Cordelia “Coco” Bittles, a close family friend who has always been like a grandmother to Rebecca, owns the chocolate shop next door, and the two are thinking of combining their businesses.

But when Coco’s niece, Alice, discovers her on the floor of her chocolate shop, those dreams go up in smoke. The local sheriff thinks Coco was the victim of a robbery gone wrong, but Rebecca isn’t so sure. As suspects start popping up all over, Rebecca is determined to turn up the heat and bring the killer to justice in a jiffy!

I’m pretty sure pencils could be rendered creepy in Grossman’s Magicians series, which casts a heavy layer of unsettling darkness over everything it touches, but the Seeing Hare is a particularly upsetting entry on this list. We’ve already discussed the inherent terror of the clairvoyant rabbit; well, here we have a clairvoyant rabbit who sets traps for those who seek it and responds to questions about the future with answers like “death” and “despair.” Sometimes followed immediately by someone dying. So…Happy Easter?

I like movies very much, but where adaptations are considered, I regard them as a sort of translation. If a novel, for instance, is a cranberry, when it becomes a movie it will be something else. A pear, perhaps. It is unreasonable to expect your cranberry to remain a cranberry in something as collaborative and primarily visual as a film. In this respect I regard the director as being as important as the actors. The choice of director will determine, along with the screenwriter, how the story is told, with the director taking the lead from beginning to end.

As a novelist, if you’re lucky, a director will share your vision, though go about realizing that vision in his or her own way. The idea of putting my novel in the hands of a great director is quite exciting because it opens it up to all kinds of possibilities that I cannot begin to imagine. Unlike some novelists, I welcome that imaginative release.

My dream list of directors begins with the Coen brothers, Ang Lee, Frank Darabont, David Cronenberg, Robert Redford, Kathryn Bigelow, Debra Granik, Sofia Coppola, Kelly Reichardt. All of these directors have certain qualities that I believe would result in a creative vision that I would find both different and yet in tune with...[read on]

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Jason Gurley is the author of the novels Greatfall, The Man Who Ended the World, and the ongoing Movement series. His bestselling self-published novel Eleanor was acquired by Crown Publishing in the U.S., HarperCollins in the U.K., Editora Rocco in Brazil, Arunas in Turkey, and Heyne Verlag in Germany. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine and numerous anthologies, among them Loosed Upon the World and Help Fund My Robot Army!!! from editor John Joseph Adams. Gurley lives and writes in Oregon.

... Ishiguro’s schoolchildren are shepherded into the world to serve a gruesome purpose. It wasn’t until 2013, when I tossed out a decade’s worth of work on Eleanor—and realized that her story would blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy—that these novels’ influence over my story became apparent.

I have a few books going on right now. I’m finishing the divine Lisa Gardner’s latest, Find Her, which continued to surprise me, page and page, revelation after revelation. I think I know what’s going on, but every scene brings something new. Gardner is one of my favorites—she had a unique voice, a unique style, and a...[read on]

In an obsessive mystery as thrilling as The Girl on the Train and The Husband’s Secret, New York Times bestselling author J.T. Ellison will make you question every twist in her page-turning novel—and wonder which of her vividly drawn characters you should trust.

The day Aubrey Hamilton’s husband is declared dead by the state of Tennessee should bring closure so she can move on with her life. But Aubrey doesn’t want to move on; she wants Josh back. It’s been five years since he disappeared, since their blissfully happy marriage—they were happy, weren’t they?—screeched to a halt and Aubrey became the prime suspect in his disappearance. Five years of emptiness, solitude, loneliness, questions. Why didn’t Josh show up at his friend’s bachelor party? Was he murdered? Did he run away? And now, all this time later, who is the mysterious yet strangely familiar figure suddenly haunting her new life?

In No One Knows, the New York Times bestselling coauthor of the Nicholas Drummond series expertly peels back the layers of a complex woman who is hiding dark secrets beneath her unassuming exterior. This masterful thriller for fans of Gillian Flynn, Liane Moriarty, and Paula Hawkins will pull readers into a you’ll-never-guess merry-go-round of danger and deception. Round and round and round it goes, where it stops…no one knows.

Rob Penn is the author of The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees and It’s All About the Bike. One of his ten best cycling books, as shared at the Guardian:

The Rider
Tim Krabbé (1978; English translation 2002)

This fictional account of a professional bicycle race by the Dutch journalist, author and former racing cyclist, is a cult classic. Finely written and full of rhetorical flourishes, it captures the peculiar dynamic of the peloton beautifully, from the point of view of one rider. At just 150 pages, it is a book you simply have to put down, in order to savour it. It is also a meditation on pain, for armchair enthusiasts who don’t fancy it much themselves. For bike-racing fans, it’s essential reading.

In this pioneering biography of a frontline Holocaust perpetrator, Alex J. Kay uncovers the life of SS Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Filbert, responsible as the first head of SS Task Force 9, a mobile killing squad, for the murder of more than 18,000 Soviet Jews - men, women and children - on the Eastern Front. He reveals how Filbert, following the political imprisonment of his older brother, set out to prove his own ideological allegiance by displaying particular radicalism in implementing the orders issued by Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich. He also examines Filbert's post-war experiences, first in hiding and then being captured, tried and sentenced to life imprisonment. Released early, Filbert went on to feature in a controversial film in the lead role of an SS mass murderer. The book provides compelling new insights into the mindset and motivations of the men, like Filbert, who rose through the ranks of the Nazi regime.

Friday, March 25, 2016

This spring, as Ireland commemorates the centenary of its 1916 Easter Rising, an event comparable in national importance to the U.S. Bicentennial, I am reading and thinking about the periods of cultural ferment and struggle that precede milestone events like the Rising or the social revolution represented by last May’s marriage equality referendum, when Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize gay marriage by popular vote.

Certainly no one could have predicted such a result in 1995, when Emma Donoghue first published Hood, a novel about a young lesbian woman in Dublin who loses her partner suddenly and must learn to negotiate widowhood without ever having enjoyed the privileges of a wife. Set in 1992, the novel depicts an Ireland before the Celtic Tiger boom and later economic crash, and most definitely before sexual liberation...[read on]

About Stewart Parker: A Life, from the publisher:

Born in Belfast during World War II, raised in a working-class Protestant family, and educated on scholarship at Queen's University, writer Stewart Parker's story is in many ways the story of his generation. Other aspects of his personal history, though, such as the amputation of his left leg at age 19, helped to create an extraordinarily perceptive observer and commentator. Steeped in American popular culture as a child and young adult, he spent five years teaching in the United States before returning to Belfast in August 1969, the same week British troops responded to sectarian disturbances there. Parker had developed a sense of writing as a form of political action in the highly charged atmosphere of the US in the late 1960s, which he applied in many and varied capacities throughout the worst years of the Troubles to express his own socialist and secular vision of Northern Irish potential. As a young aspiring poet and novelist, he supported himself with free-lance work that brought him into contact with institutions ranging from BBC Northern Ireland to the Irish Times (for which he wrote personal columns and the music review feature High Pop) and from the Queen's University Extramural Department to Long Kesh internment camp (where his creative writing students included Gerry Adams). It is as a playwright, however, that Parker earned a permanent spot in the literary canon with drama that encapsulates his experience of Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Marilynn Richtarik's Stewart Parker: A Life illuminates the genesis, development, and meaning of such classic plays as Spokesong, Northern Star, and Pentecost--works that continue to shed light on the North's past, present, and future--in the context of Parker's life and times. Meticulously researched and engagingly written, this critical biography rewards general readers and specialists alike.

When Sarah wakes up dead at the Mall of America, she learns that not only was she murdered, her killer is still on the loose. I WOKE UP DEAD AT THE MALL is a terrifically fun & voicey YA novel that tackles some of life’s – and the afterlife’s – biggest questions.

When you’re sixteen, you have your whole life ahead of you. Unless you’re Sarah. Not to give anything away, but . . . she’s dead. Murdered, in fact. Sarah’s murder is shocking because she couldn’t be any more average. No enemies. No risky behavior. She’s just the girl on the sidelines.

It looks like her afterlife, on the other hand, will be pretty exciting. Sarah has woken up dead at the Mall of America—where the universe sends teens who are murdered—and with the help of her death coach, she must learn to move on or she could meet a fate totally worse than death: becoming a mall walker.

As she tries to finish her unfinished business alongside her fellow dead teens, Sarah falls hard for a cute boy named Nick. And she discovers an uncanny ability to haunt the living. While she has no idea who killed her, or why, someone she loves is in grave danger. Sarah can’t lose focus or she’ll be doomed to relive her final moments again and again forever. But can she live with herself if she doesn’t make her death matter?

Rachel Riley is most definitely of the same opinion as Clarice Bean when it comes to wishing she had someone else’s parents; her best friend Scarlet’s, to be precise. Whereas Scarlet’s parents are cool and relaxed and talk openly about sex with their daughter, Rachel’s are repressed, mean and will not let her even have a mobile phone as it will “fry her brain” and thinks that children should “not be exposed to karaoke or E-numbers”. Rachel yearns to break free from the tyranny of her boring annoying parents. And I have to say, the way she paints them, I don’t blame her!

If Northern Armageddon were a movie, it would be an action-adventure—landing craft hurtling down the St. Lawrence River in the dark, propelled by a falling tide; an elite assault force climbing a 200-foot cliff; the advance through hostile territory to the Plains of Abraham; forming a mile-long thin red line composed of a mix of British and American soldiers; and a decisive battle that shapes the history of North America and the world.

But it would also be a psychological thriller, following James Wolfe as he falls from resolute optimism to complete collapse, confined to bed convinced that his expedition to capture Quebec is doomed to fail, his career is over, and his death from illness is imminent. Then he bounces back. Resolute, decisive, and aggressive, letting nothing stand in his way, Wolfe leads his troops to success at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and dies at the moment of victory.

Thursday, March 24, 2016

I recently blew through The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, by Steven Pressfield. I say “blew through” because it’s a quick read. However, my intention is to re-read it in a more deliberative way.

This book was recommended to me by my sister Patti who is a painter. We recently lost our mother, and ever since I’ve had a difficult time facing my work. I’ve had to figure out who I am again, as a person, and how I fit into the world in this new way.

Worlds collide in a spectacular way when Newbery and National Book Award finalist Kathi Appelt and Pulitzer Prize nominee and #1 New York Times bestseller Alison McGhee team up to create a fantastical, heartbreaking, and gorgeous tale about two sisters, a fox cub, and what happens when one of the sisters disappears forever.

Sylvie and Jules, Jules and Sylvie. Better than just sisters, better than best friends, they’d be identical twins if only they’d been born in the same year. And if only Sylvie wasn’t such a fast—faster than fast—runner. But Sylvie is too fast, and when she runs to the river they’re not supposed to go anywhere near to throw a wish rock just before the school bus comes on a snowy morning, she runs so fast that no one sees what happens…and no one ever sees her again. Jules is devastated, but she refuses to believe what all the others believe, that—like their mother—her sister is gone forever.

At the very same time, in the shadow world, a shadow fox is born—half of the spirit world, half of the animal world. She too is fast—faster than fast—and she senses danger. She’s too young to know exactly what she senses, but she knows something is very wrong. And when Jules believes one last wish rock for Sylvie needs to be thrown into the river, the human and shadow worlds collide.

Writing in alternate voices—one Jules’s, the other the fox’s—Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee tell the searingly beautiful tale of one small family’s moment of heartbreak, a moment that unfolds into one that is epic, mythic, shimmering, and most of all, hopeful.

Through an heirloom charm bracelet, three women will rediscover the importance of family and a passion for living as each charm changes their lives.

On her birthday each year, Lolly’s mother gave her a charm, along with the advice that there is nothing more important than keeping family memories alive, and so Lolly’s charm bracelet would be a constant reminder of that love.

Now seventy and starting to forget things, Lolly knows time is running out to reconnect with a daughter and granddaughter whose lives have become too busy for Lolly or her family stories.

But when Arden, Lolly’s daughter, receives an unexpected phone call about her mother, she and granddaughter Lauren rush home. Over the course of their visit, Lolly reveals the story behind each charm on her bracelet, and one by one the family stories help Lolly, Arden, and Lauren reconnect in a way that brings each woman closer to finding joy, love, and faith.

A compelling story of three women and a beautiful reminder of the preciousness of family Viola Shipman's The Charm Bracelet is a keepsake you’ll cherish long after the final page.

Nancy Pfister, heir to Buttermilk Mountain, the world-renowned site of the Winter X Games, was Aspen royalty, its ambassador to the world. She lived among the rich and famous: she partied with Hunter S. Thompson, dated Jack Nicholson, had a joint baby shower with Goldie Hawn, and globetrotted with Angelica Houston. She was also a philanthropist, admired for her generosity. But behind the warm façade, she could be selfish, manipulative, and careless. Pfister enjoyed bragging about her wealth and celebrity connections, but those closest to her, like Kathy Carpenter, Pfister's personal assistant, drinking companion, and on one occasion lover, knew better.

In 2013, after a long fall from grace, Dr. William Styler and his wife, Nancy, relocated to Aspen to reinvent themselves. They'd lived the high life before a misguided lawsuit left them near poverty, and Nancy Pfister was their answered prayer. She took them in, gave them a place to live, and allowed them to launch their new spa business. Everything seemed perfect until Pfister turned on them, making increasingly irrational demands and threatening to throw them out on the street.

When Nancy was found beaten to death in her own home, the Stylers and Carpenter were all under suspicion for the gruesome murder. But in this close-knit, wealthy town set on keeping its reputation and secrets safe from the public eye, the police struggled to solve the mystery of what really happened.

A while ago I reviewed for [the Guardian] David Aaronovitch’s memoir Party Animals. Like mine, Aaronovitch’s parents were members of the Communist party of Great Britain (CPGB) and it was astonishing how similar his household was to mine, even down to sadistic “party” dentists. A lot of the characters who featured in Aaronovitch’s childhood also appeared in mine. Betty Ambatielos (formerly Betty Bartlett), communist wife of imprisoned Greek trade unionist Tony Ambatielos for example, or Lin Qui, the elegant Vietnamese journalist and spokeswoman for the Viet Cong, who sometimes sat in our front room in Anfield looking a bit confused over what she was doing there. In his house as in ours, George Orwell was hated; he was hated because he told the truth about the terrible things communists did. We studied Animal Farm in my early years at grammar school and I was both appalled and fascinated by what it revealed about the founding of the Soviet Union. I decided if I was going to be any animal at the farm I’d be the supreme opportunist that is the cat.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

After years of reading about Kelly Link, I’m finally reading her stories. I’m deep into her collection, Get In Trouble and I don’t want to come out. Right now I’m half way through the story, “Secret Identity.” At the end of a paragraph which gives us a young woman waking up hungover, urine-soaked and utterly humiliated who seeks at least some relief shower. She goes for the scalding hot shower but quickly turns the faucet back to tepid which is “Better than she deserves.” The last line “What you deserve and what you can stand aren’t necessarily the same thing” struck me as so true on so many levels that I had to...[read on]

A heartbreaking and insightful debut novel about the wars we fight overseas, at home, and within our own hearts.

Some come back whole. Some come back broken. Some just never come back…

As an executive for one of the most successful military defense contractors in the country, Ruth Nolan should have been thrilled when her troubled son, Robbie, chose to join the marines. But she wasn’t. She was terrified.

So, when he returns home to San Diego after his second tour in Iraq, apparently unscathed, it feels like a chance to start over and make things right—until a scandal at work tears her away from their reunion. By the next morning, Robbie is gone. A note arrives for Ruth in the mail a few days later saying, “I’m sorry for everything. It’s not your fault. I love you.”

Without a backward glance, Ruth packs up Robbie’s ashes and drives east, heading away from her guilt and regret. But the closer she gets to the coast she was born on, the more evident it becomes that she won’t outrun her demons—eventually, she’ll have to face them and confront the painful truth about her past, her choices, the war, and her son.

A sweeping debut spanning from China to Hawaii that follows four generations of a wealthy shipping family whose rise and decline is riddled with secrets and tragic love—from a young, powerful new voice in fiction.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Frank Leong, a fabulously wealthy shipping industrialist, moves his family from China to the island of Oahu. But something ancient follows the Leongs to Hawaii, haunting them. The parable of the red string of fate, the cord that binds one intended beloved to her perfect match, also punishes for mistakes in love, passing a destructive knot down the family line.

When Frank Leong is murdered, his family is thrown into a perilous downward spiral. Left to rebuild in their patriarch’s shadow, the surviving members of the Leong family try their hand at a new, ordinary life, vowing to bury their gilded past. Still, the island continues to whisper—fragmented pieces of truth and chatter, until a letter arrives two decades later, carrying a confession that shatters the family even further.

Now the Leongs’ survival rests with young Theresa, Frank Leong’s only grandchild, eighteen and pregnant, the heir apparent to her ancestors’ punishing knots.

Told through the eyes of the Leong’s secret-keeping daughters and wives and spanning The Boxer Rebellion to Pearl Harbor to 1960s Hawaii, Diamond Head is a breathtakingly powerful tale of tragic love, shocking lies, poignant compromise, aching loss, heroic acts of sacrifice and, miraculous hope.

This is the story of Thomas McCreary, a slave catcher from Cecil County, Maryland. Reviled by some, proclaimed a hero by others, he first drew public attention in the late 1840s for a career that peaked a few years after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Living and working as he did at the midpoint between Philadelphia, an important center for assisting fugitive slaves, and Baltimore, a major port in the slave trade, his story illustrates in raw detail the tensions that arose along the border between slavery and freedom just prior to the Civil War. McCreary and his community provide a framework to examine slave catching and kidnapping in the Baltimore-Wilmington-Philadelphia region and how those activities contributed to the nation’s political and visceral divide.

Ursula Todd, the heroine of Life After Life, dies before she takes her first breath. Or maybe she doesn’t. On a cold night in 1910, she’s born into a wealthy British family and lives to embark on series of adventures, each divergent life path ending, again and again, in her death. But each time she dies, Atkinson sends her heroine right back to the start, and down another path her life might have taken, frequently colliding with major events of the 20th century. This novel about endless do-overs is a romp through the possibilities of fiction—and of one life.